"Don Tomas Urrea arrived astride Caballito Urrea. ... He wore his frilled white shirt and his tight black jacket cut high at the waist and embroidered with a shining scorpion on the back. Delicate red needlework etched the smallest red roses at each breast and each cuff."

In this striking fashion, the father of the main character in Luis Alberto Urrea's new novel, "Queen of America," makes his entrance to a party in her honor about halfway through the novel.

This book serves as the sequel to "The Hummingbird's Daughter," Urrea's lively and beautifully composed 2005 novel about his miracle-working Yaqui Indian ancestress Teresita Urrea. Her novelist descendant conducts the new book in as striking a manner, deploying the passion of a visionary, making music with his phrases, evoking a world in the ebullient manner of antique storytellers while employing effective modern narrative techniques.

This sequel is a world in itself, with the spiritually gifted Teresita — whose sweat smells like roses — loping into exile north of the Rio Grande in the company of her physically towering, gun-toting father and a few devoted guardians and acolytes, and facing up to the questions of how to carry on her legacy at the beginning of the 20th century as the U.S. lurches toward modernity.

It's hard out there for a miracle worker, with ties going back to antique Indian curanderas and serious gifts for tapping into unseen powers that she attributes to her Christian god. Many of the sick, the halt and the lame want her to cure them, even as she seeks some kind of peace and love and affection in her own tumultuous life.

Her father can't shield her from the many who seek her curative powers, but he can, along with a few friends, protect her from would-be assassins sent by the Porfirio Diaz government south of the river. His larger-than-life presence adds great vigor to a narrative already studded with vibrant and delightful sentences and scenes, such as when Teresita comes to the aid of three wounded pilgrims.

She lays hands on them, "then moved them away from the wounds and said her words and the pilgrims gasped and cried out softly and the wind kicked the treetops and the bats could almost be heard above them making their silent screams and kissing sounds and the moon was a thin curl of orange cotton floating in a pool of oil and the wounds burned and tickled and the pilgrims fell to their knees and kissed her hands and she said 'Rise — don't do that' and refused to accept their meager pay."

The novel presumes that her gifts come from deity. Urrea, as you've just read, describes them in realistic fashion. But this nod to the magical realist tradition — which is simply a realistic tradition in the Yaqui tribe from whom Teresita and the novelist himself are descended — grows naturally from the Urrea family tradition. Miracles happen. To drive home her point about the presence of her powers to a neo-utilitarian North American audience, she offers the case of electricity. You can't see it, but it keeps your lights glowing. So it is with the presence of God, she asserts.

Wherever you stand on the question of miracles, one thing becomes clear almost immediately. The novelist's powers work their way in this entertaining and intelligent historical fiction, studded with delights, rich in image and metaphor, the voice strong and at the same time comforting as it creates a universe replete with a multiplicity of characters, complete in body and soul. And as in the best of fiction, though the novelist himself is not physically present, his voice speaks worlds.

Alan Cheuse is the author of, among other books, the novel "Song of Slaves in the Desert."